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Federal Policy and One High School
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Posted by George Wood at 6/17/08 6:00 AM |
On June 16th and 17th Conveners of The Forum will brief House and Senate staffers on our report, “Democracy At Risk.” Released in April, the report was praised by Representative George Miller as a good place to start in rethinking the federal role in supporting our public schools. Indeed, when I think about federal policy and education I always begin by thinking about how what Washington does effects the 500 or so kids for whom I am responsible every day.
Education and the Making of a Democratic People
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Posted by George Wood at 6/3/08 6:00 AM |
In this newsletter, Forum Convener John Goodlad shares with us his most recent book, Education and the Making of a Democratic People. It is, as everything John has written, a reminder and a challenge.
Mike Rose
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Posted by George Wood at 5/20/08 6:00 AM |
The Forum’s work is that of a ‘reality based’ policy think tank concerned with educational policy that will support strong public schools. We have many friends in that work, and one of them is Mike Rose. In case you haven’t met him, we thought we would introduce you to his work in this week’s newsletter. Mike has taken the time to meet and talk to young people for whom our public schools make an amazing difference in their lives. In his book, Possible Lives (just out reissued with a new Preface) Rose takes us into schools that change the lives of young people, and it is well worth a read.
Possible Lives
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Posted by Mike Rose at 5/20/08 5:30 AM |
About halfway between the first President Bush’s convocation of the nation’s governors at Charlottesville–the 1989 education summit–and the passage of Bill Clinton’s Goals 2000, I began a journey through our nation’s public schools to document good work, visiting classrooms judged to be effective and decent places by those closest to them–parents, principals, teachers, students–places that embody the hope for a free and educated society that has, at its best, driven this extraordinary American experiment from the beginning.
Democracy at Risk
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Posted by Beth Glenn at 4/30/08 6:00 AM |
Last week, the Forum launched its first major report of 2008, Democracy at Risk: The Need for a New Federal Role in Education. Under the direction of lead authors Linda Darling-Hammond and George Wood, the Forum’s Conveners all contributed to a new blueprint for systemic, sustainable investment in our nation’s public schools, the institution that Sen. John Glenn has called “the personnel department for democracy.”
Senior Retreat Day
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Posted by George Wood at 4/8/08 6:00 AM |
I am writing this newsletter while at one of Ohio’s state parks with the members of this year’s senior class. We are on our annual ‘senior retreat’, a full day of working on the final hurdle they all face for graduation—their Graduation Portfolio. The Portfolio will be presented in May, and along with their Senior Project presented later this month, it is one of the final requirements for graduation.
When It Comes To School, Liberal Is Not a Bad Word
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Posted by Gary Lamberg at 4/1/08 5:30 AM |
Herculean tasks. Machiavellian schemes. Big Brother is watching you. He has the patience of Job.
Once upon a time those phrases could be used in conversation or in written form and everyone knew what you were talking about. I'm afraid that time may be already past.
Educational Equity
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Posted by George Wood at 3/18/08 6:00 AM |
Do we have an “achievement gap” in schools in the United States or an “educational debt” that we owe many of our children and communities? This is the question that Forum Convener Gloria-Ladson Billings puts before us in her featured piece in this edition of The Forum’s newsletter. It is a question that challenges us to revisit our nation’s oft-repeated but yet-to-be realized commitment to equal educational opportunity — a commitment fundamental to our future as a democracy.
A Letter to Our Next President
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Posted by Gloria Ladson-Billings at 3/18/08 5:30 AM |
The very fact that this letter begins with addressing either a man or woman in the office of President of the United States is in itself a cause for celebration and a tribute to the historic nature of this year’s presidential contest. For this we all—regardless of political persuasion—should feel more deeply invested in the promise of democracy to include all Americans regardless of race, class, and gender.
Democracy and School Governance
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Posted by George Wood at 3/4/08 6:00 AM |
“If democracy be our ends, noted John Dewey, then it must also be our means.” So starts Forum Convener Deborah Meier’s essay on the appropriate locus of control over our schools. It is the second in the series of first drafts of three essays which we are inviting you to comment upon as part of The Forum’s work to build a new narrative around education policy.
Who Shall Govern Our Schools?
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Posted by Deborah Meier at 3/4/08 5:30 AM |
The question of how best to "inform their discretion" while retaining control by "the people" is the task facing democratic-minded school reformers. If democracy be our ends, noted another famed educator, John Dewey, then it must also be our means.
The Federal Role in Public Education
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Posted by George Wood at 2/19/08 6:00 AM |
In our last newsletter we alerted you that The Forum will be producing a white paper on the appropriate federal role in supporting public education. In the spirit in which The Forum was convened, we would like to invite you to be a part of this process.
For the past two years we have traveled the nation holding town hall meetings, visiting schools, speaking on college campuses, meeting with federal and state legislators. Our goal has been to see both how federal policy plays out in schools and what is really necessary if such policy is going to support the democratic purposes of public education. This work has led us to the conclusions we will release in April.
Closing the Participation Gap: A Thought Piece
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Posted by Carl Glickman at 2/19/08 5:50 AM |
The faltering participation gap and the stagnating intellectual achievement gap in America are major issues related to each other. To address them, requires a renewed focus on the purposes of a democracy and the practices of education.
There are strong indicators that participatory democracy in America is in a state of grave decline. Connections to civic and religious groups are fewer; people are less connected to family and friends, more Americans live alone; people are less informed about public affairs; and trust in key institutions is low. Disturbingly, the decline in all these categories has been most pronounced among people with the least education.
A Potentially Welcome Silence
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Posted by George Wood at 1/29/08 6:00 AM |
I first noticed it when reading a New York Times piece just before the holidays. In a two page spread comparing the positions of both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates something was missing. That something was their position on education. The issue that electrified the teachers unions behind candidates that vowed to end NCLB had disappeared from the radar screen. And it has not reappeared, if a survey of the last two months of national press is any indicator.
Forgive me for saying so, but I don’t mind a break from the self-serving anointment of another ‘education president.’
Business, Conscience, and Teaching
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Posted by Paul Shaker at 1/29/08 5:30 AM |
In counseling my children as they enter careers in society, I have urged them to give priority not only to the nature of work in a field, but also to the nature of the workers in that field. In other words, it matters little whether certain activities appeal to you, if you are not compatible with those colleagues who populate your world of professional activity. In this, I feel most grateful: Living my career among teachers and other educators has been inspirational to me.
A Fresh Start?
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Posted by George Wood at 12/19/07 6:00 AM |
At my high school we run a ‘semester schedule’ with students taking four different courses each term. Thus, after the upcoming holiday break, all teachers and students will have new courses, new classmates, along with renewed optimism and opportunity. We always like the ‘bounce’ we get with this fresh start. Perhaps this is what Congress needs when they return in January with little hope in sight that NCLB will be reauthorized before the 2008 session ends.
No Child Left Behind: Changing the Way We Think About Learning
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Posted by Linda Darling-Hammond at 12/4/07 6:00 AM |
One of the central lessons of No Child Left Behind is that if school sanctions are tied to test scores, the testing tail can wag the schooling dog. And a key problem for the United States is that most of our tests aren't measuring the kinds of 21st century skills we need students to acquire and that are at the core of curriculum and assessment in high-achieving countries.
While a debate rages about whether our tests should be created at the national or state level, this argument is focused on the wrong issue.
Lessons From the Front Lines
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Posted by George Wood at 11/20/07 6:00 AM |
The mission of The Forum is to bring the common sense of successful educational practitioners to the world of educational policy. Too often educational policy is set by folks who have never taught a child to read, figured out with a family how to get a child to graduation, or juggled all the demands of putting together a school’s daily schedule. While that may never change, the least those making policy can do is pay attention to what works in the classroom and use it when making policy in the cloak room.
With this in mind, we are featuring in this newsletter a new study from California that points out what works in creating high schools for equity. The report, High Schools for Equity, comes to us from the School Redesign Network at Stanford and co-authored by Forum Convener Linda Darling-Hammond.
Update from Nebraska: Promises Worth Keeping
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Posted by George Wood at 11/6/07 6:00 AM |
Nebraska continues to be an island of sanity in the midst of the standards and testing movement that disguises itself as school improvement in America today. To remind you, Nebraska’s 517 school districts design their own assessment systems: a portfolio of teachers’ classroom assessments, district tests that measure how well children are meeting locally developed learning standards, a state writing test and at least one nationally standardized test to serve as a reality check. We have featured the work of Nebraskans before in this newsletter and last month I traveled back to Nebraska for their state-wide assessment conference to see how things are going.
The Limits of Schooling
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Posted by George Wood at 10/23/07 6:00 AM |
I had intended this week’s column to be an update from Nebraska on the work going on in that state on assessment. But while I was in the airport waiting for a flight to Omaha, my wife reached me with news every educator hates to hear—‘Tina’ (not her real name), a 1998 graduate of my high school, had been killed, falling from a fourth story window with foul play suspected. I caught the flight to Nebraska and saw some great work there—but that can wait for our next newsletter, now I want to talk about Tina.
Letters to the Next President and the Son of a Preacher Woman
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Posted by Carl Glickman at 10/9/07 12:00 AM |
The 2008 Election edition of the award-winning book Letters to the Next President: What We Can Do About the Real Crisis in Public Education will be in bookstores this coming week. With debates ranging over the progress and reauthorization of NCLB, and with presidential candidates formulating education agendas for the future of American schools, we should use this period of time to influence our legislators at all levels of government about what should be done to improve education and society.
First Draft, Part 2
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Posted by George Wood at 9/25/07 12:00 AM |
Of all the things we expected Congress to fix when reauthorizing NCLB, the over-reliance upon standardized tests to measure both student learning and school success was first on the list. Maybe taking seriously the federal government’s historic and proper role in insuring equal educational opportunity for all our children was too much to ask. (See the previous edition of this newsletter for our hopes on that agenda). But given the overwhelming evidence of how the testing craze was dumbing down curricula, narrowing teaching and limiting the educational experience of our most school-dependent children, fixing this part of the law seemed obvious.
First Draft
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Posted by George Wood at 9/12/07 6:00 AM |
One of the best English teachers I know teaches at our high school. She always draws the Senior English class assignment because she can coax out of even the most reluctant eighteen year old a solid ‘senior paper’, a right of passage at FHHS. Amongst her tools is an approach to revision that goes this way: “Nice try, but you can do better, go figure out what is wrong and let me know when you do.”
Summer School
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Posted by George Wood at 8/26/07 7:25 PM |
Summer is nearly over and in the next couple of weeks schools will fill up with students—and teachers will begin the task of trying to overcome the social and economic inequities that only they seem to be charged with battling. They take on the task willingly, but I wonder why they alone are expected to close the gaps our children face.
The Last Day (of School)
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Posted by George Wood at 6/24/07 7:03 PM |
The scenes from the last day of school in my community:
At one elementary the buses lined up and were loaded with happy, laughing kids, from pre-school to fifth grade, carrying their towels and lunches for a day at the swimming pool. The line of buses was followed by a parade of cars carrying parents, siblings, and relatives—all part of the end of the year ‘pool day’.
Accountability
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Posted by George Wood at 6/11/07 1:23 PM |
Sunday we celebrated the American ritual known as graduation at my high school. On leave this year, I was able to relax and sit amongst the faculty while our students were each presented with a diploma. From this new vantage point I noticed little things I missed when I was ‘running the show’—like each graduate taking a brief moment to wipe their sweaty palms before coming to the stage. It also gave me a chance to watch the faces of those that had made this moment possible; the pride of parents, grandparents, teachers, bus drivers, custodians, and community members that filled our hot and sticky gym.
Reading First—It's Not Just the Corruption
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Posted by George Wood at 4/27/07 7:24 AM |
Tucked into PL 107-110 (aka “No Child Left Behind”) in Part B, Subpart 1, Section 1201, Paragraph 1 is the following: “To provide…for students in kindergarten through grade 3 (reading programs) that are based on scientifically based reading research…” No one paid much attention to the language of this part of the legislation—until the $1 billion a year Reading First program was rolled out and many reading experts found that only certain, ‘favored’, programs would qualify for federal assistance. Their criticism fell on deaf ears until audits of the program found the improprieties which led to recent Congressional hearings.
Great Ideas
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Posted by Deborah Meier at 4/17/07 6:00 AM |
Some people wake up with great ideas. But I’m a night person. Right before I fall asleep I think I’ve finally found just the right way to say what it is I’m thinking. Often when I wake up I've either forgotten it or it seems banal.
But here are two ideas that keep reoccurring, and it is morning now so I’m going to try to capture them.
But here are two ideas that keep reoccurring, and it is morning now so I’m going to try to capture them.
Back to Basics
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Posted by George Wood at 4/5/07 6:00 AM |
April at my high school brings out both the high spirits of teens invigorated by new wardrobes and romances and (more importantly we hope) energy devoted to our major demonstrations of student learning. Our seniors are putting the final touches on their Senior Projects and preparing for the presentation of their Graduation Portfolios.
These are the capstones to four years of work, including their best academic work as well as their community service and internship experience. It is what we have prepared them for through our advisory system, curriculum, and teaching. For us it is the way we know what our charges have learned and what they are able to do. But for those that assess our school based solely on test scores, nothing we do after the graduation tests in March matter one single bit.
What's First?
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Posted by George Wood at 3/20/07 6:00 AM |
While visiting a science classroom in our high school last week I overheard the teacher ask a student a familiar question: “Well, what would you do first?” They were designing an experiment to test out an hypothesis a student had developed. Knowing what they wanted to accomplish (testing the hypothesis) they were now planning the steps to get there. Logic dictated that they had to start with what’s first.
It would be nice if such logic also guided our elected officials.
Talking Sense on NCLB...But is Anyone Listening?
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Posted by George Wood at 2/20/07 6:00 AM |
Squeezed into seat 35H on the Chicago to LA long haul the choice was a bad movie or catching up on my reading. So I opened the February 7 issue of Education Week dreading what the latest official word would be on NCLB. It was there, on page one—the administration’s recommendation for more tests, more vouchers, more of the same.
Standing for Students, Standing for Change
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Posted by George Wood at 2/6/07 6:00 AM |
This article by George Wood was first printed in the Jan. 24th edition of Education Week magazine.
Seeing STARS in Nebraska
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Posted by George Wood at 1/23/07 6:00 AM |
Imagine that in this era of reducing everything we do in schools to a score on a high-stakes, standardized test that one state just says no. Imagine that this state relies upon locally established standards, assessments developed by teachers and administered in classrooms by those teachers, and only gives one state wide test—a writing sample again scored by teachers. Imagine that the State Commissioner of Education supports and fights for this system, because he believes that assessment should not drive instruction but simply be one tool to assist good teaching.
Stop, Look and Listen
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Posted by George Wood at 1/9/07 6:00 AM |
Every New Year people make lists, resolutions, start working out (have you quit yet?), and imagine what the next 365 days might bring. This year one item tops my wish list: When it comes to our public schools, I want policy makers to do what we encourage children to do before crossing the street—stop, look, and listen.
Beyond NCLB
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Posted by George Wood at 12/12/06 6:00 AM |
I have to admit that when the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act was passed I paid little attention. As a high school principal I had other things on my mind, like developing a literacy program, finding funding for our students to do more internships, senior project night, next year’s schedule, and scraping together enough dimes from vending machines to send our juniors on college visits. Federal legislation was the last thing on my mind; I was interested in the quality of work going on in our classrooms.
Grand Visions and Possible Lives
Guest Commentary by Mike Rose
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Posted by Mike Rose at 11/7/06 6:00 AM |
We can all agree,” wrote a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard not long ago, “that American public schools are a joke.” This way of thinking and talking about our public schools has been with us for some time. It was what led me, in the early and mid-1990s, on a cross-country journey to observe a wide variety of public schools that had been judged by their teachers, students, and parents to be good and decent places of learning.
Election Day 2006
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Posted by George Wood at 11/7/06 5:30 AM |
It’s Election Day, 2006, and like many of you I am going to get to my email after I work at our local polling place. I try to spend every Election Day at the polls for one reason – it’s such a delight to see my current and former students come in to vote, especially those voting for the first time.
Classroom Assessment: A Brave New World
by Dr. Douglas D. Christensen
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Posted by Doug Christensen at 10/24/06 6:00 AM |
In his book, Why Courage Matters, John McCain poses a question about leadership and courage. He asks this question: “Can groups of people come together, where leaders emerge and form a bond . . . where they complete each other . . . and where they take each other to new levels that they themselves, cannot go to?” I believe the answer is unequivocally “yes!”
Notes from Nebraska
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Posted by George Wood at 10/24/06 5:00 AM |
In most states when teachers and administrators gather to talk about assessment you can count on four things: The talk will be about pass rates and cut scores; nothing much will be said about student learning; plenty of time will be devoted to how to get teachers to teach to the test; and no one will go home happy. Not so in Nebraska, a state that, in spite of pressure from the U.S. Department of Education, has refused to go down the road of standardizing their schools through a on-size-fits-all testing program.
Protecting Public Schools
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Posted by Deborah Meier at 10/10/06 5:00 AM |
When my friends and colleagues get together to talk about our best work, I note that sometimes we compare it, with pride, to “public schools”. At other times I hear adults in charter schools let the public forget that they too are public schools. It is as though our work is not part of that public sector, because we’re different than “them”--being charters, pilots, or alternative schools. We’ve entered a period of history when the connotation of “public” has been allowed to be synonymous with bureaucratic and mediocre, only of use to those with no other choices. But, when we lose a sense that “we” not “they” are the public, we have undermined our society in dangerous ways.
Back to (Public) School
Guest Commentary by Ruth Conniff
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Posted by Ruth Conniff at 10/3/06 6:00 AM |
Our oldest child is going to kindergarten this fall, and we are caught up in the back-to-school frenzy. We have to get school supplies, and I notice one telling change since we were kids: The list now includes not just supplies for our child, but a share of the pens, crayons, scissors, and glue the whole class will need this year. I guess budget cuts have reached the supply cabinet. We have to make doctors' appointments, fill out forms, find out who the teacher will be, and talk to our neighbors about finding the bus stop. It's a thrilling, poignant, nervous time.
Beyond No Child Left Behind
Guest Commentary by Tom Sobol
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Posted by Tom Sobol at 9/26/06 7:00 AM |
The new school year, and the No Child Left Behind partisans are oiling their muskets and forming their ranks. The pro’s are out to close the achievement gap, to shame people into accountability, to change the public system if necessary (or if possible). The con’s attack the clumsy testing systems, the diminished curricula, the one-boot-fits-all approach to education reform. In both camps arguments are sharpened, strategies devised, conscripts recruited. All are ready for the 2007 reauthorization of the Act – or the 2008 reauthorization, as politics dictate. The battle will dominate education policy-making for at least the coming year, perhaps longer.
The Conversation About Public Schooling
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Posted by George Wood at 9/26/06 6:00 AM |
The Forum for Education and Democracy was founded in order to change the conversation about public schooling in America. Those of us who came together to create the Forum were dismayed to see nearly two decades of sustained school renewal work being bulldozed by a national obsession with the standardization of our public schools. As test scores, AYP, performance indexes, and a cacophony of government pronouncements rang forth from national and state capitals, much of the important and good work of school people was going unnoticed and coming undone. And most of the important questions about the future of our schools were going unasked.
NCLB: All the Wrong Questions?
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Posted by George Wood at 9/12/06 7:00 AM |
This year Labor Day weekend marked not only the start of a new school year, but the full-scale launch of the 2006 election season as well. Thirty-seven governorships, one-third of the Senate, and the entire House of Representatives are up for election. Once they take their seats next January one of the first orders of business they face will be the reauthorization of the 2001 Elementary and Secondary Education Act – or what is now called the No Child Left Behind Act.
Unaccountable Accountability
Guest Commentary by William J. Mathis
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Posted by William J. Mathis at 9/12/06 6:00 AM |
The droll headline marched across the newspapers of Vermont, “More Schools Failing.” Few reporters went beyond the press release and list of schools “not making adequate yearly progress” to ask how the state (under federal direction) made these judgments. Perhaps it is time we hold the federal and state accounters accountable.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to know how many schools improved test scores, stayed about the same or how many actually got worse. Here’s why:
Teacher Quality
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Posted by George Wood at 8/16/06 9:00 AM |
Tim teaches science in my school. Starting just his fifth year he is one of the most outstanding teachers with whom I have worked. He has led our staff in rethinking how to integrate our state standards into our experiential curriculum, led the school’s research efforts on adolescent literacy, and is doing research on concept attainment and vocabulary skills. Kids love his classes because they are always engaged and challenged – be it when they found warning tape and flashing lights at the classroom door warning of an oil spill (which they had to clean up) or the energetic demonstrations of plate tectonics complete with audio and visual aids. Tim is simply an outstanding teacher.
And this may be the last year he teaches my students.
Summer Reading
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Posted by George Wood at 7/11/06 6:00 AM |
For most of us school people mid-July is when we finally close the books on one school year and take some time off. Next school year is far enough away that school planning can wait and we settle into a few weeks of down time. Just in case you have not yet chosen books to read on the beach or at the cabin, here are a few suggestions in addition to those works you will find by our Conveners on our website.
Independence Day
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Posted by George Wood at 7/4/06 6:00 AM |
It seems appropriate on Independence Day to remind ourselves that a healthy democracy relies upon a healthy system of publicly supported schools. Perhaps America needs more than to be reminded, it needs to be reawakened to the fact that without public education they very notion of “the public” will perish. Or, as Jefferson put it so eloquently, “If Americans desire to be free and ignorant, they want something that has never been and never will be.”
Reality Based Educational Policy
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Posted by George Wood at 6/27/06 6:00 AM |
Ever wonder why educational policy at the state and federal levels seems so out of touch with the reality of the school or classroom? Maybe it's because the people who write it have so little connection or experience with actually doing the job. A recent book by Elizabeth DeBray recounts the path the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation took. It is a real eye opener for those of us who don't spend time inside the beltway. The bottom line is that NCLB was driven by ideology and power politics, not experience with teaching and learning.
Education for What?
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Posted by Deborah Meier at 4/5/06 9:51 AM |
A few years ago I started speeches by suggesting that the time would soon come when “big schools” were re-discovered. There’s nothing more fickle in the world than the successive reform waves that occur in the field of education. Rereading David Tyack (e.g. Mangers of Virtue and The One Best System) should be a must, alongside Richard Rothstein’s The Way Things Were. I keep the latter on my night table to soothe my sometimes irritated nerves when confronted with another old nostrum in new guise. Fortunately, most of the reforms never really get practiced, we just talk about them.
Teaching Against Idiocy
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Posted by George Wood at 3/28/06 11:38 AM |
Idiocy is the scourge of our time and place. Idiocy was a problem for the ancient Greeks, too, for they coined the term. "Idiocy" in its original sense is not what it means to us today -- stupid or mentally deficient. The recent meaning is deservedly and entirely out of usage by educators, but the original meaning needs to be revived as a conceptual tool for clarifying a pivotal social problem and for understanding the central goal of education.
No Surprises in New Report
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Posted by George Wood at 3/28/06 6:00 AM |
Today the Center on Education Policy will release the most encompassing survey to date on the effects of the No Child Left Behind legislation. To no surprise to those of us who deal daily with the law's narrow minded focus on test scores, the survey shows that many schools are reducing or eliminating time spent on subjects other than reading and math. As the New York Times reported in Sunday's front page story: ". . . 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music, and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math."
Public Schools Are Hotbeds of Democracy
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Posted by George Wood at 3/27/06 11:58 AM |
An interesting article by Walter C. Parker, professor of education at the University of Washington and the author of "Teaching Democracy: Unity and Diversity in Public Life."
Democracies don't materialize out of thin air. They are created -- and maintained and deepened -- by citizens. If citizens are to safeguard civil liberties, elect wise officials, become wise officials themselves, make sense of the news and negotiate public policy with other citizens in an ever more diverse society, "their minds," as Thomas Jefferson said, "need to be improved to a certain degree."
First Amendment Left Behind, But Why?
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Posted by George Wood at 2/28/06 6:00 AM |
The recent Knight Foundation study of student awareness of the First Amendment is frightening. From their survey of more than 100,000 high school students they found that young people on the verge of citizenship are woefully uninformed and, in fact, disinterested in their fundamental democratic rights.
Looking for Evidence
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Posted by George Wood at 7/19/05 10:37 AM |
Two interesting news articles caught my attention recently, both having to do with how in spite of improving test scores nothing seems to have changed in terms of student performance.
On June 26th, the Boston Globe reported that in spite of Massachusetts’ students having to pass a test for graduation, 37% of freshman at public colleges still need remedial help. That’s down only 2% from 2002, the year before the test was required.
What's Wrong With High Stakes Testing?
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Posted by George Wood at 5/16/05 12:35 PM |
As a school principal I am often asked why I do not support high stakes testing. After all, doesn’t the existence of a test for graduation force kids to take school more seriously? And doesn’t it make teachers do a better job of teaching?
The answer to both questions is no. In fact, it is my experience that not only do such tests not improve schools, they actually hurt them.